Deborah Gopstein

At the gym one day a few years back, Howard Leavitt started chatting with a Korean War veteran at a nearby locker. Leavitt told the man that he too had served in Korea, as a Marine, and he was aghast to hear the man respond, “I didn’t even know there were Jews in the Marine Corps.”Leavitt decided that the time had come for him to serve his

In the close-knit community of Greenmeadow, Calif., a 2-year-old girl diagnosed with a rare Jewish genetic disease cannot talk, but her spirit speaks loudly enough to touch many people beyond her neighborhood.There is no cure for the disease afflicting Sophia Herzog-Sachs, who was diagnosed with Niemann-Pick Type A in early 2002 and whose life

Suzanne Krupskas’s patients say that she is the best physical therapist they’ve ever seen. She’s better than most, they say, because she has a unique perspective that helps her empathize with her patients. After all, Krupskas has been coping with her own physical pain for more than 20 years.Krupskas has Type 1 Gaucher disease, the most

A team of scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, recently solved the three-dimensional structure of glucocerebrosidase, the enzyme whose deficiency causes Gaucher disease.As a result of this development, new therapies for Gaucher patients may become available soon. The development was reported in July